The Longest Sleep (2024) portrays the rituals of mawlid (‘anniversary’ in Arabic), birthday celebrations for historical, local Sufi saints who serve as mediators to God. While grounded in a religious context, the film is concerned less with doctrine than with transcendence as a cyclical, time-distorting experience. Through breath, movement and repetition, Rafik Greiss explores the bodily and neurological dimensions of devotion, presence and altered states.
Greiss is also showing wall sculptures that he has constructed through a wide-ranging process of urban scavenging: throughout his travels in Georgia and Egypt, the artist has collected and repurposed found or discarded objects from urban sites, which for Greiss are witnesses to various large-scale transfers such as travel, migration and colonisation. These objects have been re-appropriated poetically as part of the sculptural assemblages. Thais (Bird of Paradise) (2024) recasts the interior of a piano that was recovered from the streets of Tbilisi as a sculptural medium, giving it new life while lending it a reliquary air. Presented alongside these works, Mawlid Doormats (2024) function as markers of thresholds that once stood at the entrances of Sufi mosques and houses during the mawlid festivals in Alexandria.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Rafik Greiss (b. 1997, Cairo) is an Egyptian artist based in Paris. His photography is atmospheric, provocative and sensual, using both digital and analogue techniques. Mitchell Anderson has described his work as ‘a commitment to sensation rather than theme or medium’, yielding ‘a body of work cohesively contingent on the ability to recognize one's own senses’. Greiss’ solo exhibitions include The Longest Sleep (2024) and Closer (2021) at Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris. Group exhibitions include Tolia Astakhishvili: to love and devour, Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, Venice (2025); Undercurrents, Galerie Molitor, Berlin with LC Queisser (2025); Zurich Biennial, Kunsthalle Zürich (2024); Ser Serpas: Hall, Swiss Institute, New York (2023).
EXHIBITED WORKS
Rafik Greiss (b. 1997)
The Longest Sleep, 2024
3-channel video, colour, 10:01 min, stereo
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Balice Hertling
Rafik Greiss (b. 1997)
Mawlid Doormats, 2024
Found wooden doormats, glass, metal clips
150 × 75 cm
150 × 55 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Balice Hertling
Rafik Greiss (b. 1997)
Thais (Bird of Paradise), 2024
Found piano frame
100 × 135 × 18 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Balice Hertling
